Not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. How much you breach conditions of probation is taken into account by the system. Stopping accepting instances of what he’s done is merciful in one quarter, but also makes it less likely he’ll get help. So, yeah. Good-bad.

Although they may be assigning someone to directly investigate his activity… but I can’t imagine they’d put that level of resources into an internet harassment dude, breach or no.

He spammed me once a few weeks ago but I didn’t report it because it was a short spam, not his usual long, incoherent rant. I wasn’t sure it was him. YAY for spam folders. I’ll report it now that I know he was out and off his meds.

Farley also said he believes Markuze was behind a series of threatening messages posted on a webcast Farley took part in on Wednesday with a group called Virtual Skeptics. One message read, “the police won’t save you.” Markuze appeared before a judge at the Montreal courthouse on Monday where he was released after agreeing to a series of conditions, including that he not communicate with Farley.

And I’m sure, given his recent history, he’ll hold to those promises, right?

For someone this disturbed he seems to have gotten at least one thing right.

Remember Kevin Mitnick? He was naught more than a computer trespasser, silently poking his way into computers to learn systems. His biggest “crime” was downloading a file that a phone company sold for $20, while the media pretended he was some sort of “destroyer of worlds”. His sentence? Four years in prison (released after one) and barred from using ANY communications technology – other than landline telephones – during his probation.

The judge in Markuze’s case let that sociopath out after six months despite uttering threats of violence and puts no restrictive limits on his use of a computer. Clearly, some judges have no sense of proportion – on no sense, period.

I think you may be confusing Mitnick with Craig Neidorf, aka Knight Lightning, co-founder and editor of Phrack magazine in the mid to late 80s.. He was charged with receiving stolen documentation on the E911 system, and publishing it online.

During the trial, it was shown that more detailed documentation could be purchased from Bell South for as little as $13. Charges were dropped after that.

Mitnick was guilty of many things, including cellular fraud (cloning phones, etc), penetrating many companies computer systems (and thus the clean up costs), wiretapping, invading the privacy of others by reading their email.

Now, he certainly wasn’t the destroyer of worlds that he was made out to be in court and by the press, but he certainly was no angel.

Never mind the fact that the police or state were not monitoring, at all, the conditions of his probation WRT internet belligerence. Hell, who was it – Farley? – had to convince the police that there was a court order in the first place, by producing it for them. Which is probably why Markuze has roamed free on the net spewing his shit for months.

Well I admit that I have not experienced much of him. I only heard that he was spamming and stalking a lot of people. But it is hard for me to imagine that he made such a huge impact that everybody in the Montreal area (and the world) needs to know about his arrest. Most people probably never have heard of him.

I mean seriously. Would you want to see your name on twitter after the police has arrested you for let’s say a traffic violation?

I could understand the police tweeting about it, if he was a wanted criminal that everybody knew by name anyways.

A traffic violation is hardly comparable to spending two decades of your life sending out emails to dozens, if not hundreds, of recipients, informing them that you plan to murder them and their families. Markuze is a tangible danger to himself and others.

He’s the epitome of the guy who, after he kills/injures someone, everyone reads the bio and asks “What the hell was someone like that doing running around loose?!” It’s like the guy who shoots up the school, and you find out he got a gun while on prescription strength, anti-psychotic medication, which he had stopped taking a few weeks prior.

It looks like all he got was a wrist-slap, after being asked to pinky-swear never to be a bad boy again. Courts are notoriously inept at realizing that such “punishments” don’t work with genuinely crazy people.

Well I certainly agree that he is dangerous and that the police should do something about him. The point I was trying to make was entirely different: I would like to see a little more discretion from the police.

Markuze might be dangerous but he is not a guy that everyone knows by name. The commenters here do know him because he targeted many of the bloggers but I am reasonably sure that hardly anyone in Montreal knows him.

IMHO are they are entirely right to arrest him. But I don’t think it is right to make a big deal out of it. And my comparison with a traffic violation was not meant to compare the severity of the offense but to compare it with the number of people who are affected by it.

The substance abuse could potentially be a contributing factor. The Bipolar Disorder, not so much.
In the worst 1% of cases, manic episodes can sometimes cause dissociation and severe behavioral effects. But the biggest characteristic of Bipolar Disorder is its cyclical nature.
My grandfather was a severe case. He’d occasionally go completely nuts … for about two weeks. Then, he’d be more or less normal for a few months … then swing down to the depressive side, for a couple months, and ask my grandmother to bring him his rifle, so he could shoot himself.
Speaking from personal experience, the manic, potentially-delusional period of the cycle is very short, relative to the rest of the cycle. I’m not a very severe case, so mine are just like a 2 or 3 week long adrenalin hit.
Dennis is delusional ALL THE TIME. There’s something else causing it. Maybe there’s nothing causing it. Some “psychotic” people have a clinically diagnosable and treatable condition. Some are just assholes, and the only way to fix them is by wiping their mind and giving them a new personality.

This is the problem with the way our legal system handles cases of potentially dangerous people. The police scoff at these accusations, thinking it’s just some guy talking smack on the internet…we have WAY more important things to worry about.

However, aren’t these the kind of things we’re told to watch out for BEFORE something more sinister happens? The police have been served up a great example of a person who needs serious mental help and surveillance now, instead of waiting until after he follows through on these threats. If this man ever does commit a violent act, no one can use the cliche “I never saw it coming…he seemed like such a quiet, peaceful man”.

Yeah, always much more comforting to hear from the neighbors that a serial killer was a sadistic bastard and that they feared for their life every moment. Then, when the police came and arrested the guy, no one was surprised.

2 major problems demonstrated with this situation. First, putting people in jail won’t help especially because mental health services are even less available than they were thanks to fed government policies so he will come out worse. Second our legal system resources are drained by the futile and wasteful enforcement of drug prohibition laws so they don’t have time to devise real solutions or engage in prevention activities. Further, people on probation or on bail are not monitored because there are not enough resources.